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The Eiffel Tower was not, at its birth, universally admired. The fact that it was supposed to be temporary did not mollify the people who disliked it, chief among them the short-story writer Guy de Maupassant. You probably read his work in middle school, and maybe even wrote a report on one story, “The Necklace,” about a woman who suffered for her vanity and for not recognizing real from false.
Maupassant hated the tower so much that, almost every day, he ate his lunch in the restaurant at the foot of the tower. It wasn’t the menu that drew him but the view. It was the only spot in Paris, he said, where he didn’t have to look at the damn thing.
Call me heretical, but sometimes I feel that way about L.A.’s palm trees. The difference is that there is almost nowhere that you won’t see a palm tree, including right out my back door.
Don’t blame the tree. It’s not its fault that it’s overexposed. Throughout 150 years of boosterism, through our latest cataclysm of fires, the palm tree image makes visual geolocation instant and easy.
No need to spell out “Southern California” or “Los Angeles” or even “L.A.” Like the shape of an incandescent lightbulb or a Coca-Cola bottle, it’s universally known. Put a palm tree on it; it must be L.A.
L.A.’s higgledy-piggledy architecture is one of our most charming characteristics. Devotees of “denture” subdivisions, their acres of red tile roofs over white stucco walls, may find no delight in a Greek Revival house across the street from a Tudor half-timber, next door to a mansard-roof casa with Disney garden gnomes out front, but most of us do. Do we contradict ourselves? Very well then, we contradict ourselves. We are large, we contain multitudes of styles.
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Yet we always know where this is, and where we are. How? The palm trees, in the back garden, the front yard, along the avenues, on the ridge up yonder.
Our palmy years began way before Hollywood and the enormous hillside onetime real estate sign of that name.
Southern California was packaged, marketed and sold as paradise. The Garden of Eden surely had palm trees. Los Angeles was the new Garden of Eden. Therefore, L.A. must have palm trees.
And if a green and glamorous palm tree signals the idyllic, a flaming one shouts “dystopian,” divine punishment, an Eden expulsion in situ.
From this critique I make exceptions. They are certainly pretty, even if they do serve as Airbnbs for rats. And the New Yorker made the stereotype work sensitively. Its Jan. 27 cover was an elegant and elegiac illustration of seven long-legged, shaggy-capped palms against a menacing ombre orange backdrop of approaching fire.
You can live here long enough that you don’t really notice them anymore, but once you start looking, you can hardly see anything else. In a room at the French consul general’s, a diptych of palms as long-legged as Paris runway models. A stubby flutter of greenery at a gas station, and a lofty palm behind an IHOP. The South Carolina license plate on the Honda stopped in front of me at a red light, and its silhouette of the state’s signature palm looking regrettably like a tarantula atop a swizzle stick.
Like a lot of every other kind of greenery, it too is an immigrant, like our people, which has been noted to the point of tiresomeness. Our native palm is the California fan palm, reaching five, six, even eight stories tall. If untended, it has below the green top what some people call “petticoats” of dead leaves, but I think they look like those furry chaps that silent movie cowboys used to wear.
The Mexican fan palm, supposedly brought here by the mission-building padres to supply Palm Sunday foliage, can grow taller, maybe 10 stories, and skinnier, and can dip and sway camera-readily in the wind. Our palm panoply extends to the ritzy Canary Island date palm, the pygmy date and windmill palms, and a mini-monarchy of queen and king palms, which look a little haphazardly asymmetrical. Down the status and stature yardstick are the shorter, stockier Mediterranean fan palm as well as the jelly palm, whose fruit lives up to the name.
The raffish banana palm, which had such a vogue as landscaping for Midcentury Modern apartments, surely grows best throughout the Beverly Hills Hotel, where its stylized Deco looks have been the hotel’s signature motif since Don Loper designed it about 80 years ago.
If you like, spare yourselves long looky-loo palm-spotting drives and go to the Huntington Gardens for a living palm encyclopedia, something like 90 palm species in one place.
Palm trees are hardly alien to this hemisphere. Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who blasted his way through Aztec Mexico, complained about them in a 1525 letter to his master, the Holy Roman Emperor. “Our ownly food was palmettos boiled with the meat and without salt, and the cores of palm trees” — hearts of palm, a future foodie TikTok rage.
The oldest surviving palm in L.A. is probably the Washingtontonia filifera that stands in Exposition Park. It’s not outrageous to conclude that it’s all of 200 years old, a lifespan not impossible for the species.
That tree had wandered around town for some years. Wherever its native soil, sometime in the mid-1850s it was taken to a yard on San Pedro Street in downtown L.A. In 1888, when it was already of Social Security age, the newest landowner, a Mr. Saunders, moved it and two of its brethren to ornament the entrance to the Southern Pacific’s Arcade train depot. And in 1914, it was carted off to Exposition Park near the Los Angeles Coliseum, where it stands, more or less, to this day, stressed by age and the city around it.
It’s our real native palm. Most varieties have been carted in from elsewhere. South Carolina’s palm, the Sabal palmetto, arrived in L.A. late in the 19th century, and a striking example grew at Fourth and Main in present-day downtown. So too did a “bunya bunya” tree — a pine, not a palm, but it deserves mention here if only because an Australian tree authority quoted in the same Times story about the Sabal tree assured Angelenos that while the bunya bunya’s nuts are edible, “a prolonged diet of these nuts tend to cannibalism.”
No one thought so much about plants’ drought-tolerant or shade-giving virtues then. Big civic tree-planting campaigns, like one in 1915 in the business district, stuck palms along sidewalks between streetlights. In the years before the 1932 Olympics, the city likewise put many thousands of palms and other trees along wide, bare boulevards. Ramping up to the 1984 Olympics, the exceptional Tree People group recruited Angelenos and civic groups to its program, planting hundreds of thousands of all kinds of trees ahead of the Games.
But don’t slight Southern California’s earlier signature trees. The best remains the fragrant and fruitful orange tree, the original arboreal icon that fetched newcomers here by the tens of thousands. And plein-air painters filled their canvases with the dramatic silhouettes of the California live oak.
And oh, yes, the eucalyptus — the Tasmanian blue gum variety, melancholy and romantic-looking, the Hamlet of trees. Driving up the 101 from L.A. toward Santa Barbara, you can see them in rows here and there, sentry-like, along the highway.
Australians brought the seeds with them into the Gold Rush. But the joke was on us. Their lumber, intended for railroad ties and building timber, was a crappy crop, soft and short-lived. Eucalyptus trees made fine firebreaks — when they weren’t burning themselves, all that fragrant oil flaming and flaring away.
Which brings me back to palm trees, to L.A.’s third-rail topics: age, and death.
In the fires, palms went up with a whoosh, like matchsticks in hell. The dried fronds caught fire and drifted on the winds, like flying torches. But fiery death alone does not imperil them. Age does. So many that were planted a hundred and more years ago are reaching the outer limits of lifespan.
Palms have smaller and less dramatic enemies too. The South American palm weevil came north across the border in 2011 and headed straight for its preferred victim, the glamorous Canary Island palm. The fusarium wilt fungus was born in California; it goes after vulnerable palms. It also killed hundreds of Beverly Hills’ Canary Island palms, for it turned out that it could be transmitted by tree trimmers’ cutting tools, carried from one tree to the next, the way that olden days’ doctors killed new mothers by going from one delivery to the next without washing their hands between patients. Dirty chainsaws also can carry “sudden crown drop,” which does exactly what it sounds like: Decapitate the green palm top.
When it comes down to it, L.A.’s palm trees are like the lilies of the field, glorious to behold but neither toiling nor spinning, many of them sucking down water and providing barely enough shade to cover a Hula-Hoop. L.A.’s future trees have to earn their keep.
I was gratified to see my POV on the palms (but not the Hollywood sign) shared by architect Michael Maltzan, who designed that stupendous 6th Street Viaduct. He told my colleague Tom Curwen, “I’ve often thought that we should get rid of the palm trees and the Hollywood sign, because as icons of the city, they keep us in a state of arrested psychological development. Maybe they had a place, but now they are emblems of a cliched sensibility, of Los Angeles as some sort of dreamland, that doesn’t capture or express the depth of this city, its uniqueness, its complexity, its messy, sprawling beauty.”
Anyway, it may be moot. Vegas casinos and hotels are buying up palm trees and driving up the prices beyond what municipal budgets can afford, so more palms may not even be on the shopping list.
So what’s to become of them?
In certain parts of town — downtown, Hollywood, South Park — the palms are being protected for their iconic or historical heft. And there will still be enough to get us through years of selfies for the 2026 World Cup, the 2028 Olympics, another Super Bowl and — please — World Series.
In 1984, the Olympic Arts Festival took the palm tree as the theme for the exhibition “Los Angeles and the Palm Tree: Images of a City.” More than 100 renderings by artists as grand as David Hockney delivered fugue variants in form and material. My favorites may be the palm-printed sports shirts hanging on a white wooden palm tree-clothes rack, and artist Jeff Sanders’ metal and polyurethane palm tree.
And why not? Palm trees, like Angelenos, can go on forever, in one manner or another. Bring on CGI palm trees, palm trees light-projected onto freeway walls, stenciled onto the sides of buildings. Take every species and variant of palm tree in town and cluster them in an artificial grove, like “Urban Light” for palm trees.
And absolutely include in it the blow-up plastic palm trees, holographic palm trees, neon palm trees and one of those ghastly cellphone towers trying to resemble a palm tree.
Do it. Conflate the real and the fantastic. It’s always worked for us before. We’re L.A.
Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison
Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.
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